Archives for September 2018

The Nashville coffee landscape gained a distinctive cafe and roastery this August in Berry Hill. Stay Golden is the latest project from Sean Stewart, Jamie Cunningham, and Nathanael Mehrens. Last December, they began working with parent company, DesignWorks on the concept and enlisted many familiar faces from the Nashville coffee community to be part of it. The trio have all worked in various parts of the Nashville coffee scene for the last several years, Steadfast Coffee being their most recent project. Cunningham said this concept is an evolution on their thoughts on coffee and hospitality and a “resurrection and completion of ideas and past projects.”…

The Aeropress enjoys a cult following around the globe, and Turkey is no exception. We recently were on hand for the 2018 Turkish Aeropress Championship in Istanbul, which attracted baristas from as far afield as Ankara and Izmir to see who was the best at making coffee with a plastic tube. …

There are few jobs in the coffee industry as romantic or mysterious as roaster. Traditionally, the tradecraft of the making-coffee darker arts has been a closely guarded secret, passed on from roaster to roaster in old fashioned apprenticeships. Other than a couple of good books, there aren’t many resources available to aspiring novice roasters. Joe Marrocco is helping to change that. The longtime Cafe Imports educator recently moved on to work with Mill City Roasters, but the year-long video project Roasting Concepts is now free to view on YouTube. We caught up with “Roaster Joe” over email in the midst of his busy travel schedule to learn the thought behind the project–and how young roasters can develop their skills.

Over the last seven months Cafe Imports has been releasing a series of videos called “Roasting Concepts.” What inspired the project?

This is a project that I worked on with Cafe Imports over several years. I know that the videos seem very simple and short, but they took a long time to conceptualize, carve out time for and put together. The idea was born out of teaching people roasting at the Cafe Imports headquarters in Minneapolis….

We love hearing from our readers, especially if they’re passing through one of the cities where our blogging team is based (Louisville, San Francisco, and Istanbul). It was in the latter we met up with Canadian barista Gavyn Stroh, sharing a pour-over at Coffee Department in Balat. Istanbul is one of the world’s great travel hubs, so it’s not uncommon to meet visiting coffee professionals. But what made our visit with Gavyn exceptional was his mode of transportation. Turkey is one of 34 countries Gavyn cycled through over the last 12 months. We’ve been following his journey since that delicious, naturally-processed El Salvador we shared, and we’ve been taken by its breath-taking panoramas, ever-increasing tan lines, and of course, the many cups of coffee along the way. Now that his journey is coming to a close, we caught up with him to learn about coffee on the open road.